Flint-Scoles take the long road to win first Manhattan Beach Open

MANHATTAN BEACH, California — There is the path less taken to a Manhattan Beach Open title.

Then there is the path taken by Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles.

The maximum number of matches one can play in winning a Manhattan Beach Open championship is nine.

Flint and Scoles played nine.

No team in Manhattan Open history has pulled off such a feat.

They lost five sets and didn’t even win the point differential battle in their third match of the tournament, a 21-17, 13-21, 15-11 victory over Carly Kan and Lexy Denaburg. Twice, they won via forfeit and thrice they won in three sets.

The final, which on the surface appears to be a relatively reasonable 22-20, 21-13 win over Kelley Kolinske and Hailey Harward was, of course, nothing close to relatively reasonable. It was played in a modest hurricane, on their third match of the day despite the hour only being 10 a.m., a few hours before a 5.0 earthquake would hit — yes, there was one Sunday north of here — because what’s normal anyway these days for Flint and Scoles?

Flint’s tried the normal way of winning this tournament. Two years in a row, she made the finals without dropping a single match, in 2021 with Emily Day (now Capers) and 2022 with Kelly Cheng. Even held a 13-10 lead in the third set a year ago.

Would have been too normal. Too smooth. Not nearly enough adversity involved.

Instead, Flint’s first and long-awaited Manhattan Beach Open title came in the longest manner possible, as the only team to ever win in Manhattan after losing their first match, with a partner in Scoles who spent nearly as much time in the medical tent as she did on the court, with rain dumping in record numbers … in August … due to the first hurricane that has hit California in 84 years.

That’s all a drenched Flint needed to get her name on the Pier, the tradition in which the victors of the Manhattan Beach Open are inscribed into a plaque and cemented into the pier.

The day started early on Manhattan Beach. With a storm headed to Southern California sure to bring, at the least, a lot of rain, the AVP chose to start at 7 a.m. Sunday. Subsequently, the title matches were not streamed live on either ESPN+ or the Bally Live app, but were shown later Sunday in their regularly scheduled time slot on ESPN2. And even that was delayed a few minutes as a pro softball game finished up.